Manhattan Projects

The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York

Samuel Zipp

Stunning debut book on the history of urban planning and postwar New York.

Marks the start of resistance to urban renewal in the 1940s, rather than the 1960s.

Compellingly argues that the rise of the global city and urban blight are linked.

Manhattan Projects

The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York

Samuel Zipp

Description

Moving beyond the usual good-versus-evil story that pits master-planner Robert Moses against the plucky neighborhood advocate Jane Jacobs, Samuel Zipp sheds new light on the rise and fall of New York's urban renewal in the decades after World War II. Focusing on four iconic "Manhattan projects"--the United Nations building, Stuyvesant Town, Lincoln Center, and the great swaths of public housing in East Harlem--Zipp unearths a host of forgotten stories and characters that flesh out the conventional history of urban renewal. He shows how boosters hoped to make Manhattan the capital of modernity and a symbol of American power, but even as the builders executed their plans, a chorus of critics revealed the dark side of those Cold War visions, attacking urban renewal for perpetuating deindustrialization, racial segregation, and class division; for uprooting thousands, and for implanting a new, alienating cityscape. Cold War-era urban renewal was not merely a failed planning ideal, Zipp concludes, but also a crucial phase in the transformation of New York into both a world city and one mired in urban crisis.

Manhattan Projects

The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York

Samuel Zipp

Table of Contents

Part II: Stuyvesant Town2. Remaking the Ethic of City Rebuilding3. The Mass Home in the Middle-Class Cityscape

Part III: Lincoln Square4. Culture and Cold War in the Making of Lincoln Center5. The Battle of Lincoln Square

Part IV: East Harlmen6. Cold War Public Housing in the Age of Urgan Renewal7. Confronting the "Mass Way of Life"

Conclusion: Under the Sign of the White CrossNotesIndex

Manhattan Projects

The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York

Samuel Zipp

Author Information

Samuel Zipp is Assistant Professor of American Civilization and Urban Studies at Brown University.

Manhattan Projects

The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York

Samuel Zipp

Reviews and Awards

Honorable Mention, Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians

"Samuel Zipp's Manhattan Projects is a significant and welcome contribution to this scholarship...[A] rich, detailed, and well-documented historical analysis." --Journal of American History

"Samuel Zipp's gracefully-written Manhattan Projects offers detailed, well-illustrated case studies of famous urban renewal schemes to make a larger point about urban planning in modern America." --Contemporary Sociology

"Zipp's rigorous, thoughtful, and careful argument is a guide out of the intellectual dead end represented by the conventional narrative of urban renewal. He both reframes much of our existing knowledge of the subject and then adds to it with details that directly and indirectly cast the planning history of twentieth-century New York in a fresh and convincing light. This is a masterpiece of research, synthesis, and persuasion."--Timothy Mennel, Journal of Urban History

"Zipp offers a fresh perspective on this dispiriting tale. Unlike many of his scholarly predecessors, who regarded the anti-urban agenda of policy makers as a given (why else would they have so destroyed our cities?), Mr. Zipp tells his story from the point of view of policy makers who loved cities and who thought they were making a 'benevolent intervention'...compelling...[an] absorbing account." --Wall Street Journal

"Giving projects built by Robert Moses and the New York City Housing Authority their due, Professor Zipp argues that urban renewal cannot be measured merely by the number of structures that were bulldozed or built. Rather, he makes a convincing case that the policy also transformed 'the terms by which cities were understood' and recast debates over 'the impacts of modernism, progress, public and private power, and cold war ideology on culture, politics and social life.'" --New York Times

In prose that balances academic rigor and storytelling Mr. Zipp makes his case with a compelling re-creation of the postwar historical moment Manhattan Projects takes long strides toward rescuing urban renewal from today's regnant discourse, which brushstrokes the monolithic towers that are now our visual touchstones for poverty are understood as the work of hubris at best and, at worst, anti-poor and anti-urban. --New York Observer

"Compelling...challenge[s] readers to rethink what are fast becoming standard misconceptions of New York City's history." --Next American City

"Intense and meticulously detailed." --New York Journal of Books

"Lucidly written and intricately argued."--The Berkshire Eagle

"Beyond his capacity for detailed research, Zipp's greatest talent as an historian may be his ability to pursue the various threads of his arguments to their conclusions, leaving the door open to the many ironies that have typified New York's conflicted history." -- New York History